The Topline: VP of Media Thoughts on Working From Home

This week on The Topline, I continued to talk to working parents who are figuring out how to do life, how to do school, how to do parenting, all at once, in the middle of a pandemic.

I talked with Jen Pera, the VP of paid media for a healthcare marketing and advertising agency, who lives with her fiancé and her two sons in Austin, Texas.

How are you blending all these needs and roles right now?

Jen: As best as probably anyone else. The boys’ school was supposed to start August 18th, it's been postponed till September 8th, but it's all online. I'm already completely anxious about that, how to be on Zoom calls all day and monitor my 9-year old and how to help them with the technology.

My fiance works out of the home. He's a home builder, so he's gone from six to four. So while he's supportive, he's literally not home. It feels very much back to like my single mom days of how am I going to do all of this at once and still, at the end of the day, the most important thing is the kids and how do I honor them the most and yet still provide a roof over our heads, and feel like I'm not just band-aiding and scotch-taping life as I go.

How have your kids impacted your career?

Jen: I’ve been working remote since my oldest was two; I worked for myself for 10 or 11 years, so I could work and juggle parenthood.

The remote working thing hasn't been new, it's the demand on my time, because they're here, running in and out of their room all the time, and how to help them with their schooling, how to keep them busy. Well, what do I do with them all day?

Do you just allow more screen time?

Jen: I've come to terms at the beginning of this, like in March. I was a typical mama, pretty lenient anyway, but how much screen time? How did they do this? And now I've just given up, I've tried to just give myself a little grace. Like, if I was a friend talking to me with those things I'm concerned about, I would say, no one knows how to do this, you don't know any worse or better than anyone else, have a little grace. And, for a middle school boy, this is like what they've been training for. This is totally how they react and how they relate to one another. Anyway, they sit online and play games and talk and give each other shit.

They've really done well at finding ways to still connect with their friends that really I had nothing to do with. So it gives me a little faith that they're more resourceful and more resilient than I think I gave them credit for going in.

What are the conditions you feel like you need in your life to be your most creative and do you have those conditions right now?  

Jen: Certainly not. I think I've become a little numb to a lot of it, like the kids in the background, the pets, I have four cats. I'm surprised there's not one on my lap, I mean, they're all over all the time. And the kids are in and out, Bode running in, can you buy me this on Roblox, and I need to buy this, and I'm thinking, why am I doing this? And I'm doing it to get them out of the way. I would say that's definitely lacking. I think it's definitely more a case of doing the best I can. I feel like I'm half-assed at work sometimes, I feel like I'm half-assed as a mom sometimes, and trying make sure that they're both keeping up.

It's tough as moms, because as supportive as your partner is, the reality is the kids turn to you, they turn to you, you're still the one who keeps everything together. And at the same time, you're just like, oh, I just want a deep breath.

So the half-assed feeling is something I've heard over and over and over again in my work through a'parently. What would it take for you to feel like you could put your “full ass” into your work while you're parenting?

Jen: You know, I think peace and quiet, I think the kids back to school, when they were in school and I had the 8-3 period of quiet, I'd pretty much book as much as I could then. I'm missing that quiet.

What's one tip you would give working parents right now?

Jen: I think just realize that everybody is in the same boat. No one feels like they're doing this right, everyone feels like they're not enough. I'm seeing these parents with their back to school kids, and they've got like situations where the kids are set up with like offices and desks and writing, and I'm just like, what? You're going to be at the dining room table, right? Good.

I have to stop comparing myself what I can give and what I can't and what I can do and what I can't, and just accept that like everyone's doing the best they can. Everyone else has different opinions on all of this, and there's all of that politicization of all of it. And just to say like, at the end of the day, everybody feels they're doing what's best for their family, and just cut each other some slack and try to be kind to yourself.

What’s one new family tradition you’ve started lately that you want to keep?

Now we curl up in bed and watch Cheers or the Twilight Zone. So it's like half hour or an hour, just all of us just kind of sitting together, curling up on the couch or in bed and just zoning out. Cheers is much better the second time around, by the way.

So I'm trying to … at the end of the day, pull together what's important, even though during the day, they'll literally make me lunch and bring it up to me, it's come to that. I have no idea what the nutritional value of it is. And you just kind of say, you know what, this isn't forever.

If you were designing a T-shirt right now for working moms, what would it say on the shirt?

Jen: I have a mask that has a thought bubble, all the swear words, how they put them together and like symbols and signs, it's that. It's pink, but it's just swear words and thought bubbles, there's no letters or anything. That’s what I’d put on a shirt.

What have you done just for you lately?

Jen: Well, I have a horse, and Chloe is hands-down my sanity. My time with her, I hate to say it like this, but putting my phone in my tack trunk and leaving it there for an hour and a half or so, is so lovely. And just connecting with someone else who doesn't want anything from you, other than carrots, and just being outside and in nature and exercise, kind of all of it in one, and that partnership feeling, really kind of restores me. I come home feeling so much better.

How do you see this changing work for your team, for your company, for all of us?

Jen: We've had a lot of conversations at work about it, and my company really wants to do what's best. Realistically, they're in a bind. They said, you can work flexible hours. And I'm like, yeah, the reality is though I can work nine to five and have meetings and stuff, and at five, I've got four people staring at me with eyes, like, is it my turn? I want to have dinner, I don't want to have meetings till eight. And at 9:00 I'm exhausted, I don't want go back to a meeting.

So while I appreciate the gesture of it, the reality of how that would work, just isn't sustainable. They're in a kind of a bad spot too, like, what can they do? What can they offer that's fair to everybody else who also doesn't have kids?

Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think I should ask future guests?

Jen: How are you actually mentally holding up? Because it's really, the answer is like, by a thread. I cried yesterday. There's some days I'm like, I've got this, they're okay, and other days I'm just a puddle. That's probably what most people are going through, and I think just acknowledging that, any position you're in right now, it doesn't matter where you're at in life, it's really hard, and this is affecting people in every way.

I have faith that the stuff you're doing and talking like this with people, to realize you're not alone, we're all feeling like this, in different ways, everybody affects differently, but we're all feeling like, what do we do? Like how do we do this?

That is something that has come through in every workshop I've ever done from the beginning of this work, but even more so now, because I think people feel more now like they can say it.

Jen: Exactly. It's true though, because before it was like, you're supposed to be able to keep it all together. You're right, now is the first time we're able to say, oh my God, I'm drowning over here. Everyone's like, oh yeah, me too. And it's like, well, weren't you six months ago?